EDITORIAL: Labour mobility barriers hit young hardest

Adam Smith, foreground, a second-year apprentice in construction electrical at the Nova Scotia Community College Waterfront campus in Dartmouth, works on an electrical stack under the watchful eyes of fellow students at the college earlier this month. The Atlantic provinces are standardizing apprenticeship programs in the region. (TIM KROCHAK/Staff)

Young Nova Scotians can’t afford the dysfunction of a country that makes it hard for them to move across provincial boundaries to get work.

Or to find apprenticeship training that allows them to qualify for better pay and jobs. Or to come home again with those improved credentials and prospects.

Young grads today, even with good skills and education, have to be prepared to move to get that first job or crucial experience — things that will allow them to have more choices later about where they want to live and work.

So what could be dumber public policy than failing to sort out the mish-mash of provincial apprenticeship and specialist standards that prevent young Canadians from easily changing provinces to access work and training?

In Atlantic Canada, governments have made some recent progress toward harmonizing requirements that apprentices have to satisfy to write their Red Seal exams and to qualify for journeyman status in their trades.

Last month, Atlantic premiers agreed to harmonize apprenticeship training for 10 trades by 2017 and to have four of them (cook, electrician, bricklayer and instrumentation technician) standardized next year.

Yesterday, the Nova Scotia government named seasoned industry members to its new Apprenticeship Agency. It’s charged with getting more employers to offer apprenticeships (fewer than 27 per cent who could offer apprenticeships choose to do so) and to sort out practical issues like ensuring class time doesn’t conflict with peak periods of work in the industry in which apprentices are training.

These are sensible changes and we salute them. But young Nova Scotians need the barriers to come down much faster and more broadly than this.

It shouldn’t take three years to harmonize standards in 10 trades if we’re serious about giving students more options than going to Alberta. Many young tradespeople will go to Alberta in those years. Unless we strike a harmonization deal with that province, they’ll continue to face problems if they want to come back. That’s absurd in a province desperate to increase its working-age population.

To her credit, Labour Minister Kelly Regan says she is negotiating with Alberta to solve this problem. But it’s the Alberta magnet that is gaining young workers, and Nova Scotia that is losing them, so it’s this province that most needs to get creative and make some adjustments.

As Industry Minister James Moore reminded us in a Halifax speech last week, there are many more provincial regulations that make it easier to do business with people in 40 countries than with Canadians in another province. They cost us about $60 billion a year in lost economic activity, in spite of an agreement the provinces signed 20 years ago to create a more open national marketplace.

The cruellest aspect of that failure is denying a young generation, who already often face a tough job market, opportunities to work, to get a good start and to grow.